On Leaving the Shallows

I’m doing a PhD because I want to have thoughts that last longer than a Facebook status update.

You guys, of all my flip one-line answers to the question “Why are you doing a PhD?”, that’s probably the closest to the truth.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m madly in love with my research topic. But couldn’t I have just read a book about it in a weekend? Instead, I’m relishing the opportunity to spend four fricking years thinking about it; and thinking about it deeply, from different angles, understanding it in different ways.

The idea of thinking about one big question for four years is so appealing to me, because I’m fighting to get my mind back.

Nicholas Carr writes in his excellent book, “The Shallows”:

“Over the last few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going - so far as I can tell - but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think.”

Don’t you just know that feeling?

My brain feels hyperactive, disconnected, fragmented, the way a computer hard drive gets fragmented, bits stored all over the place and none of them lining up. In fact I actually visualise the process of having longer thoughts as a defragmentation process, exactly like the gif that used to play in the Windows 97 defragmentation software, except that it’s the neurons in my brain re-configuring themselves so that they fire in longer and longer sequences, my thoughts being re-arranged until there’s a linear path all the way through.

Carr attributes this sense of mental change to the ubiquitousness of the Internet.  Which is not to be curmudgeonly, but to say simply that technology changes the way we think.

All technology changes the way we think: maps made us start thinking of the world cartographically, clocks had us dividing our lives into segments of time. The introduction of writing  - crude marks on mud and walls - brought with it the possibility of storing information outside our memories, of working out the potential for conveying information to people who aren’t even in our own space and time. The invention of the book - perhaps the greatest technology of all  - led to longer and more developed thoughts, arguments with more complex structure, narratives transcribed in a way both literary and linear.

But - and this I think is the crux of Carr’s argument - the internet isn’t linear. It does not promote linear thought. The internet is a web of hyperlinks and interconnectivity - before you’ve finished with one idea, you’ve opened pages on three others.

And it’s not just the medium that has changed - it’s not just that we now read newspapers on line, translated faithfully from print to pixel. The content of the medium is changing too. It’s being produced in increasingly smaller chunks, unbundled from each other. An album on iTunes is divided into its parts. A few pages of a book are available on Google. That’s all you need to get what you want - that one song, that one quote - disembodied from its original context.

My brain feels fragmented because through the technology of the internet I am dealing with information in a fragmented way. Some people laud this as a benefit - in the new world, we need to be able to attend to and sift and deal with all kinds of bits of information streaming past us and this is just a new skill that we’re learning.

But can we learn this new skill - can our brains adapt to this new way of processing information - without losing some of our capacity for long, linear, slow thoughts?

I'm discovering that doing a PhD involves many different kinds of thinking. A lot of it is necessarily non-linear: project management involves attending to a myriad different, hyperconnected demands - proposals, applications, emails, negotiations - in a way that adapting my mind to deal with the internet has equipped me for.

But I’ve also spent the first six months of my PhD reading journal articles and books - books! - all the way through, from start to end, in a linear fashion, everything bundled together and in its context - and my mind is starting to feel just a little bit more whole.

Nicholas Carr (2010) 'The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains', published by W.W. Norton and Company